IUP Football Diary, Week Four: Back on the Road

By David Lind
Executive Producer, WIUP-TV
The fourth in a series of weekly articles that go behind the scenes of the Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s TV production of the school’s 10-game football season.
Lind
offers insight into what it takes to produce college-football coverage in a cost-effective manner. In week four, he and his team have problems to solve.
After last week’s great performance by the student director and camerapersons, along with some communications, microphone, and cable problems, you would think our next game production would have been even better.
We traveled to California University of Pennsylvania for a noon kickoff between two nationally ranked D2 teams. FSN of Pittsburgh was broadcasting the game live, but that did not hamper our setup or camera locations. We did our normal run-through, and everything seemed, at the time, to be operating smoothly.
About 10 minutes before kickoff, however, our slo-motion unit would not replay plays. I immediately called our system technician to troubleshoot the problem with the operator, but after trying all of his suggestions, the unit still did not work, and kickoff was moments away. I told the slo-motion operator to continue troubleshooting on her own and told the announcers that slo-motion was down. About two minutes into the game, we had slo-motion back.
The slo-motion problem turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg. The director missed his cue and was late running the opening tape, the up-camera operators seemed to forget everything they had learned, and the graphics were not quite right. To top it off, one camera would not zoom in all the way, and I had to leave the booth to solve the problem. Since rain was in the forecast, all cameras had their rain covers on, and part of the cover was interfering with the zoom on the lens.
Finally, I had enough and read the entire crew the riot act, which I can’t print here. They got their act together during the second quarter and through the post-game interviews.
Thanks to Jim Artzberger of Viewpoint Productions for giving the students a tour of his production truck.
Because
of technical problems, IUP Football Diary, Week Three missed the Sept. 25 SVG
College Sports Video Insider. Here is the story: IUP
Football Diary, Week Three: At Home at Last